Why the Zipcar-Avis Deal Means You'll Finally Be Able to Give Up Your Car

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Why the Zipcar-Avis Deal Means You'll Finally Be Able to Give Up Your Car

Photo: Zipcar

While Zipcar investors count their cash from today's half-billion-dollar acquisition by Avis, the rest of us can start counting the days until we can say good riddance to one of the least rewarding aspects of city life: car ownership.

Zipcar said Tuesday that Avis had agreed to purchase the Cambridge, Mass.-based company for $12.25 per share, or about $500 million. The deal brings Avis the most prominent brand name in what Zipcar describes as the $400 million car-sharing market. The question is, will the added muscle of Avis be enough to take car-sharing mainstream?

Though Americans prize individual car ownership as a birthright, the reality is that owning a car in the big city can be more hassle than help. In cities, insurance costs more. Gas and parking tickets cost more. Traffic stinks. New Yorkers pay more for parking spaces than other people pay in rent. The too-short gaps between San Francisco driveways taunt visitors who want to park at all.

A dozen years ago, Zipcar launched in Boston with the idea that many urban dwellers could get by without owning a car. Instead, we could just rent a car by the hour every now and then when we needed it. In the meantime, Zipcar takes care of insurance, maintenance and all the other headaches that accompany ownership.

While that might sound ideal to those of us who like oil changes about as much as root canals, the promise so far hasn't panned out.

San Francisco, for example, has dozens of Zipcar pickup locations, many with multiple vehicles. But it's still not enough to make last-minute car booking easy. You need to plan ahead. And most of the cars are stationed downtown, not located around the city's farther reaches, where driving is more of a necessity.

For many of us, achieving the dream of not owning a car would necessitate near guaranteed access when we did need one. Zipcar, or a service like it, would have to approximate the "magic rental store" described by Kevin Kelly in his essay "Better Than Owning":

Why own, when you get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing? But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it? If you lived inside of the world's largest rental store, why would you own anything? If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored "downstairs" in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.

Reaching this point requires a ubiquity that Zipcar's 10,000-vehicle fleet, spread out across more than 150 cities worldwide, simply doesn't provide. In its press release announcing the Avis deal, Zipcar says that its new parent company's bigger fleet will give it more cars to meet demand and, in the company's words, "accelerate the revolution we began in personal mobility."

Maybe seeing its rival take such a leap will goad Enterprise and Hertz into bulking up their own tepidofferings in rent-by-the-hour car-sharing. And maybe services like RelayRides that let individuals rent out their own cars by the hour will start to take off. In that scenario, the number of cars available to drive without having to own them grows. The magic rental store becomes less magical and more real.

The only thing better for the car-averse like myself will be the day that a Google-powered car shows up at my door ready to whisk me away to fulfill some minor errand or even better, transport me to some major party. Not only do I not own it, but neither me � nor anyone else � ever has to drive it at all.